Fomenting Antisemitism

I’ve been teaching the Holocaust for the better part of my career at university and beyond. It seems to me that in all of the chaos of this Trump administration, their most consistent policy thus far, maybe even their single most consistent policy, has been to foment antisemitism.

Though they say that they are seeking to combat antisemitism, I want to invite you to think along with me about whether this is true.  I think all the evidence suggests the opposite view, namely that this administration is seeking to spread antisemitism.

Please consider these five factors: the instigators, the target, the history, the provocation, and the conspiracy theory. 

First, the instigators. 

Who are the people behind this policy? And do we have good reason to believe that when these people go after American universities, they’re really concerned with antisemitism?

Consider the two most important people in the federal government, Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Donald Trump has claimed that if he loses a presidential election, Jews will have to pay a special price. He has said that he wants his money handled by Jews. He has said that during the Nazi rallies at Charlottesville, there were good people on both sides. Donald Trump has had dinner with avowed fascists. 

Consider Elon Musk. He is the first person in a major role in American public life to have carried out a Hitler salute. He opened his social media platform, X, to fascist and antisemitic views. 

These are the instigators. These are the people behind the policies. I think we can presume that this policy is not one which is meant to be friendly to the Jews. 

Second, consider the target. 

The target is American universities. This administration is after universities in general and they are using all sorts of pretexts to target them. They’re bringing the Jews into it because they want to, but the real target is the universities. And consider what they do when they have federal control over an institution of higher learning. For example, after purging all the books in the library of the Naval Academy, there are still two copies of Mein Kampf, but all books about the memory of the Holocaust are gone. They are targeting universities, not antisemitism.

Which leads me to the third point, the history. 

There is a long history of governments going after books or libraries or universities, and in that long history, the people who do that are never on the side of the Jews. There is not one case of people who attack universities in order to side with Jews. That has never happened and, whatever they say, that is not what is happening now.  

The fourth point that I want us to consider is the provocative element.  

As Trump, Musk, and this administration go after universities, they’re simultaneously enacting a policy of deporting students, some of them Muslims, who have committed no crime, who are not accused of committing any crime, but who are being seized off the streets and deported. This is not the sort of thing which promotes good relations among various religions. It’s not the sort of thing which is meant to promote benevolent intercommunal relations. On the contrary, I think it must be understood as a provocation. 

And lastly, please consider what it means when the government claims that it’s enacting all kinds of policies because of antisemitism, especially when it makes no sense. What they’re trying to do is to say or to imply that the Jews are in charge, furthering the image that everything that happens, right or wrong is, in the end, the responsibility of the Jews. And that, of course, is a fundamentally antisemitic way of seeing the world.

Take Columbia, for example, which is where this policy started. Columbia has a more than 20% Jewish student body. Columbia is historically known as the “Jewish Ivy.” Attacking Columbia for being antisemitic is not just contradictory; it is illogical, perverse, and destructive.   Now the US government is asking Columbia to prove over and over again that it’s not antisemitic, creating a mood of terror to force them to prove themselves, to publicly criticize themselves, and to abase themselves. That is not a politics which is favorable to anyone. It’s not a politics, beginning or end, which is going to be favorable to Jews. And it suggests to me the essential underlying point, which is this:

If we allow the government to claim that it is fighting antisemitism when it is in fact fomenting antisemitism, then we lose the concept of antisemitism entirely. We lose the word. We lose the ability to describe a very phenomenon, one which unfortunately is getting worse all the time, not just in the United States, but around the world.

If one is interested in combating antisemitism, one must preserve the concept and one must preserve the word. If we allow it to become just a stick by which people, including antisemites, beat other people; if we allow it to become just one more bureaucratic tool that the government uses in order to deny people their rights, or to dismantle higher education; then it can’t be used for its true purpose, which is to describe a horrifying problem in the real world.

An earlier version of this essay was published in Timothy Snyder’s  substack, “Thinking about …” (snyder.substack.com/p/fomenting-antisemitism)